>Pol Pot: Brother Number One

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A television photographer takes a picture of Pol Pot’s body, stretched out on a simple bed in a hut in Anlong Veng, Cambodia. (AP)

More than a million Cambodians died under Khmer Rouge leader’s rule.

By Craig Simons
Austin American-Statesman (Austin, Texas, USA)
INTERNATIONAL STAFF
Sunday, May 28, 2006

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement for nearly four decades, went by many names.

Born in a small village in central Cambodia in 1925, his parents called him Saloth Sar, the name he used when as a young man he received — through patronage, not high marks — a scholarship to study in Paris. There he developed a radical Marxist ideology, which he later melded with ideas borrowed from China’s Mao Zedong.

After returning to Cambodia in 1953, he worked his way through the ranks of the Communist Party and took charge of the movement in 1963.

Sometime during that decade he began to use the name Pol Pot, derived from French for “political potential.”

When the Cambodian government was overthrown in a pro-American coup in 1970, the Vietnamese communists, at war with the United States, began to train and arm the Khmer Rouge, and in April 1975, the guerrillas occupied Phnom Penh.

Somewhere along the way, Pol Pot picked up a new name: Brother Number One, a reference to his position at the top of the party and the nation.

Over the next four years, he forced millions of urban residents to move to the countryside and abolished money, schools, newspapers and religion.

At least 1.5 million Cambodians died under his rule through execution, torture, disease and starvation.

From 1979, when the Vietnamese army captured Phnom Penh, until his death on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot again took refuge in the jungle, first to lead a guerrilla movement and later to avoid prosecution for misrule.

His death before he could be put on trial leaves history as his only judge.